Tag: Police Abuse

Sunday, John Oliver dedicated his main story on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” to explaining civil forfeiture, a “shady process” that police departments across the country have been using to seize property with little justification.

If we focus only on the abusive acts of athletes such as Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, we may miss the fact that in the U.S. the families at highest risk of domestic violence are actually relatives of law enforcement officials.

“A lot of cities like to use violence as a last resort,” a Ferguson policeman played by David Koechner says in a recent Funny or Die video clip, “but we’ve found it’s pretty fun to use it as a first resort.”

“Do you not understand that life in this country is inherently different for white people and black people?” the “Daily Show” host asks of Fox News’ pundits on the show’s first day back from a summer break.

Police brutality against black men has become a shockingly common phenomenon in the U.S. The names of those who have died at the hands of law enforcement or their unofficial vigilante deputies over the past few years are too numerous to count.

Mychal Denzel Smith, a contributing writer at The Nation, argues that the impetus behind the Ferguson protests isn’t the slaying of one unarmed black man since the incident is not uncommon in present-day America.

Several journalists have been arrested during protests held in Ferguson, Mo., over Michael Brown’s shooting; Egypt issues a statement urging the U.S. to employ “restraint” in the Missouri suburb, seemingly mocking similar statements from the American government in the past; meanwhile, the Arctic’s snow depth has fallen significantly in the past half century. These discoveries and more after the jump.

“I can’t breathe” was one of the last things 44-year-old Eric Garner said after being arrested by New York Police Department officers and placed in what appears, in a bystander’s video, to be a chokehold.